Diversified services such as E-mail (Electronic Mail), a spreadsheet and the like have been recently provided by cloud services. By combining such diversified cloud services with the use of a workflow engine, a business process using cloud services can be built at low cost in short time.
A workflow engine is software that assigns operations to a responsible person and a system in accordance with a workflow, and that sequentially executes tasks.
A workflow is information that defines a series of process procedures of business operations. The series of process procedures include contents of processes, and information indicating an execution order and a flow of the series of processes.
Contents of processes defined by a workflow include a process executed by using a cloud service such as Software as a Service (SaaS) or the like. Services provided by such a cloud service include diversified services such as E-mail, a spreadsheet and the like.
In the meantime, cloud services that provide functions similar to, for example, E-mail, a spreadsheet and the like are offered, for instance, by a plurality of vendors. Accordingly, in a design of a workflow, by way of example, for a process executed by using a cloud service, one of available cloud services of the same type is selected. As a criterion for selecting a cloud service intended to suitably design a business process, the cost and the availability of a cloud service to be selected are considered.
When a cloud service is selected, it is important to estimate the cost and the availability of the service. If a cloud service is selected without estimating the cost and the availability of the service when being designed, problems such as an excessive cost, low availability and the like can possibly come to the surface after the workflow is executed. In this case, the workflow needs to be redesigned or modified, leading to a waste of time and cost.
In a workflow, a plurality of cloud services having a similar function are sometimes used together so as to improve the availability. In this case, it also becomes important to estimate the degree of availability improved by using the cloud services together, and an additional cost incurred.
Techniques described in the following documents are known.
International Publication Pamphlet No. 2013/031129
International Publication Pamphlet No. 2011/018827
Luke Herbert and Robin Sharp, “Using stochastic model checking to provision complex business services,” In proceedings of 14th International IEEE Symposium on High-Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE′ 12), pp. 98-105, IEEE, 2012.
Luke Herbert and Robin Sharp, “Precise Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic business Process Model and Notation Workflows,” Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, Vol. 13, 2013.